Recalibrating to Pleasure and Joy

byDeborah PenneronNovember 1, 2015

I am recalibrating my default from pain to pleasure.

This means that rather than wander predominantly in direction of pain, as they have, my thoughts and the feelings that follow ( or my feelings and thoughts that follow) will now wander predominantly in the direction of joy and pleasure. It feels like a marathon … because it is.

Part of how I am doing that is by exploring in new ways the sensations of pleasure as it expresses in my body, allowing the resilience I have cultivated with the lower frequency emotions to expand into holding the sensations of orgasm. Life force creative energy. It feels scary good.

Fear is coming up in waves,

unrelenting waves, as I explore the creative energy of orgasm. Again and again. Fear and grief. I don’t know which is easier to feel, fear or grief. They feel very different. Neither one feels good and both are intimately familiar to me. That familiarity makes them manageably “comfortable.” Until I walk in uncharted territory. Recalibrating to pleasure is uncharted territory for me.

The fear, even after handling the primary thing that I had attached it to ( which was big by the way) is still here. It is free floating, as though it’s looking for something new to attach itself to.

Here’s the understanding that accompanies this sensation of fear. It is no longer deeply embedded in my cellular structure blocking the receptor sites that allow in other feelings, good feelings associated with the chemicals dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. The fear is loose, hovering, passing through.

I had a conversation with one of my nieces last week as my family began coming together in Corvallis the day before the celebration of the marriage of another niece. I spoke about my first climax with a man. I spoke of it with her partly because I’ve just written my story for the next anthology of stories (Autobiographies of Our Orgasms) being compiled and edited by Betsy Blankenbaker, so the awareness was fresh, and partly because we were talking about disconnect and it fit the conversation. I feel compelled to talk with almost everyone I meet about restoring our connection to pleasure.

I spoke to her of the disconnect I felt in that experience and the subsequent hunt I initiated at the time to explore ways to repeat the experience. Her response was along the lines of how sad that you weren’t aware. Your life could have been so different. Do you ever wonder?

There was a time when I would have said “Every day of my freakin’ life!”

Not any more.

There is no more room for regret. Everything I have ever experienced (or not experienced) in this life has brought me to THIS now. So, no! I don’t wonder anymore about the paths that were not open to me for whatever reason. I’ve spent so many years carrying an undercurrent of anger at the course of my life. Anger at what wasn’t apparently available to me, anger at myself for the choices I have made, anger at God for the way of it.

Oh my! Those “if only”s, those “What if I had known, done, chosen something else instead of what I did choose” questions.

If only I had known what orgasm felt like before I had sex with a man … if only self-pleasuring was not labeled “sin” in my growing up years … if only my mother had been more open about sex with me. (She was as open as she knew how to be btw which was more open than many in her era.)

All that does is create agitation in my nervous system , which can come out of seemingly nowhere sans wondering about that which I have no control over so why invite that agitation? It moves me from a place of empowered choice into victim fairly instantly. That doesn’t feel good. It is abrasive. It is physically painful.

So no, I don’t wonder anymore.

I look at the gift of understanding that has dropped in in the moment and feel appreciative of the opportunity to make a different choice if I want to. That awareness was not available to me in my earlier years. It is now. That is a richly pleasurable sensation, knowing that I can choose, and knowing that resilience can be cultivated.

I am recalibrating my default to pleasure. In every area of my life. And it is good.

Fun seemingly inconsequential fact: The word oxytocin (the bonding feel good love hormone) had to be added to my spell-check dictionary. The replacement word that I could choose instead? Oxycontin … which is a sustained release narcotic

I’ll leave you with that amusement! It is rich with content for another time !!